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Kremlin's long-term plan to absorb Belarus alarms Kazakhstan

By Kanat Altynbayev

People cross a street in the Belarusian capital of Minsk on February 17. The administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strategy to incorporate Belarus into Russia by 2030, reported the Dossier Centre, a project of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. [Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP]

People cross a street in the Belarusian capital of Minsk on February 17. The administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin has a strategy to incorporate Belarus into Russia by 2030, reported the Dossier Centre, a project of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. [Natalia Kolesnikova/AFP]

ALMATY -- A leaked plan created by the administration of Russian President Vladimir Putin to absorb Belarus into Russia by 2030 is raising concerns that Kazakhstan could become the Kremlin's next target.

The strategy document, titled "Strategic Goals of the Russian Federation in Belarus", was leaked by someone in the Kremlin in February, reported the Dossier Centre, a project of exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky.

The document, seen by the Dossier Centre and a number of Western media outlets, was produced by Putin's administration along with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Federal Security Service (FSB) and General Staff, according to analysts.

The strategic plan calls for Belarus to become the next country after Ukraine to be forced to join Russia.

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) meets with his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka outside Moscow on February 17. [Vladimir Astapkovich/Sputnik/AFP]

Russian President Vladimir Putin (right) meets with his Belarusian counterpart Alyaksandr Lukashenka outside Moscow on February 17. [Vladimir Astapkovich/Sputnik/AFP]

A demonstrator last October 10 in Tbilisi, Georgia, burns his Russian passport during a rally to condemn Russian attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees and activists organised the rally. [Vano Shlamov/AFP]

A demonstrator last October 10 in Tbilisi, Georgia, burns his Russian passport during a rally to condemn Russian attacks on Ukraine. Ukrainian refugees and activists organised the rally. [Vano Shlamov/AFP]

To do so, the Kremlin intends to make Belarusian laws match Russian laws, shape Belarusian foreign policy in Russia's interest, build up Russia's military presence in Belarus, ensure the supremacy of the Russian language over Belarusian and give Russian citizenship to Belarusians, the Dossier Centre reported.

According to the document, which was drafted in 2021, Russian authorities plan to achieve these goals by 2030.

The Union State

The Union State, a supranational entity consisting of Russia and Belarus and formed in 1999, plays a major role in Russia's strategy.

The Kremlin plans to use the entity to expand economic ties as well as control over Belarus's military and political sector.

For their part, Russian intelligence has been tasked with limiting the influence of "nationalist and pro-Western" forces, reforming the Belarusian constitution to take Russia's interests into account and strengthening pro-Russia sentiment among the military and political elite and the general public, the Dossier Centre wrote.

The Kremlin's strategy anticipates that by 2030 Russia will institute control over Belarus's media space by increasing the number of Russian media outlets in Belarus and by intensifying Russia's propaganda influence over the population.

In addition, the Putin administration plans to embed "pro-Russia special interest groups" in Belarus's elite political and military community.

Furthermore, a simplified procedure for issuing Russian passports to Belarusian citizens will be introduced "with the aim of creating a stratum of Russians interested in integration and a business community focused on the Russian market", the document states.

"Passportisation" is one of the Kremlin's favourite methods of meddling in former Soviet republics' politics.

"That [policy] gives them a pretext to interfere and defend the rights of their own citizens," Anatoly Lebedko, a Belarusian opposition politician, said in an interview with the Dossier Centre.

He pointed to similar efforts to issue passports to residents of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine in order to extend Russia's interests in those regions. Abkhazia and South Ossetia are Georgian regions occupied by Russian troops.

"If they need to, [Russian officials] can use the rights of their compatriots as rationalisation for forcible intervention," Lebedko said.

Russian political strategists also intend to deploy instruments of "soft power", such as education.

As part of its strategy, Moscow plans to open testing centres in Belarus for the Unified State Exam, which Russian pupils take in order to graduate from high school and compete for slots at universities.

Russia seeks to open centres of science and culture in the Belarusian cities of Mogilev, Grodno and Vitebsk.

It is likely that these will be branches of Rossotrudnichestvo -- a federal agency set up to deploy Russian soft power -- which often turn out to be cover for Russian intelligence officers and agents of influence.

The Kremlin's strategy, which is fed by Putin's geopolitical ambitions, is focused on creating a "Great Russia", a goal that Putin has never hidden, analysts say.

The Kremlin's end goal is to incorporate Belarus into Russia, Michael Carpenter, the US ambassador to the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), said in an interview with Yahoo News on February 20.

"Russia's goals with regards to Belarus are the same as with Ukraine. Only in Belarus, it relies on coercion rather than war," he said.

Rainer Saks, the former director of the Estonian Foreign Intelligence Service, suspects that Russia could accomplish its goals much sooner than projected.

"It is surprising to me why this target -- 2030 -- is set so far ahead. Why should Russia wait so long?" he said, according to Yahoo News.

Concerns in Kazakhstan

The reporting on the Kremlin's strategy to absorb Belarus was not comforting to observers in neighbouring Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan faces a similar threat from Russia, Dimash Aljanov of Almaty, a political analyst and consultant to the OSCE, told Caravanserai.

"We must not get confused and imagine that a threat takes only the form of a full-scale war of occupation. Rather, at issue is a gradual expansion of Russia's sphere of influence in Kazakhstan, especially if the Russian army is destroyed in Ukraine," he said.

Putin is now using Kazakhstan to prop up the Russian economy and to surmount Western sanctions and Russia's isolation, he said.

For those goals, Moscow relies on the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU or EAEU), which it co-ordinates and to which Kazakhstan and several other post-Soviet republics belong, Aljanov noted.

Against this backdrop, a new danger is rising: the expansion of Russia's presence in the Kazakh economy directly or through shell companies and individuals, he said.

"The overall opacity of the economy and of the movement of capital makes it impossible to accurately track these processes, but there's a trend you can see: from the purchase of pieces of infrastructure to new agreements on natural gas and financial institutions," Aljanov said.

In 2020, the Kazakh and Russian defence ministries signed an updated military co-operation agreement that among other things stipulates the training of Kazakh intelligence officers in Russia, he added.

"We can conclude that bringing Kazakhstan closer to Russia puts all the conditions in place for Russia to conceive and carry out a similar [to the case of Belarus] strategy to broaden its influence," Aljanov said.

The threat of Russian military aggression against Kazakhstan is real, say others.

It is not out of the question that Russia could attempt forcible intervention in Kazakhstan's domestic affairs in order to strengthen its control over the country, said Yerlan Ismailov, a blogger in Astana.

"They've been laying the groundwork for this for a long time. For example, they created an artificial problem of Russophobia in Kazakhstan, just like in the first phase in Ukraine," Ismailov told Caravanserai.

"We cannot let our guard down with a neighbour that's as aggressive as Russia."

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There's an important detail here. Back in the day, Alexander Lukashenka mostly supported the Union State initiative, probably intending to replace the ageing and ailing Boris Yeltsin. With the ascent of Vladimir Putin, that opportunity vanished, but he managed to negotiate Russian subsidies providing Belarus with some late Soviet decor while balancing between the EU and Russia. But after the brutal crackdown on peaceful protests against the falsified presidential elections in 2020 and turning into an accomplice in the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2022, Lukashenka extremely narrowed the space for a political manoeuvre. Now he looks more like a Kremlin Gauleiter than an equal Russian ally.

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Belarus is Belarus

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